The 20th anniversary of the film “Linda Linda Linda” gives the coming-of-age comedy-drama a new 4K restoration and U.S. rerelease, which comes to Cambridge for a weeklong run starting Friday. The little film about a girls’ cover band in Japan has proven timeless in a way that keeps surprising even its director, Nobuhiro Yamashita.
“It’s still influencing me. I think it’s a mysterious movie that I can’t figure out myself,” Yamashita said in an Aug. 26 international video call aided by a translator.
The film begins with an accident: A band of teenage girls loses its guitarist to a broken hand. The remaining three members must adjust their positions and find a replacement vocalist for an upcoming performance. They ask Son, a Korean exchange student with little familiarity with the Japanese language, to step in. Son listens to the song they plan to play, by the classic Japanese rock band the Blue Hearts, and is moved to tears. She joins eagerly.
The film stars Bae Doona, Aki Maeda, Yu Kashii and Shiori Sekine as the band – teens who are just as interested in vegging out and eating snacks after school as they are in the music they play.
“It was set in Japan in the suburbs, and it’s just about girls covering a band,” Yamashita said. “I really thought only Japanese people would understand the story and understand the film. It turns out this is the movie among all my movies that a lot of people outside of Japan know about.”
Yamashita was already well-acquainted with the coming-of-age genre by the time “Linda Linda Linda” was conceptualized in the early 2000s. But at age 28, he was focused on the world of young men.
“When the producer came to me asking me to direct this, I was thinking ‘Why me?’ I was really more about depicting good-for-nothing men and their stories,” Yamashita said. “I really didn’t understand what I could do and why I should be doing this. But then I thought at the moment, I’m going to challenge myself.”
The 2005 film was a critical success and became a Japanese cult favorite – in the United States too, where a New York Times reviewer calling it “one of this year’s most unexpected pleasures” didn’t keep it from being, for a while, seemingly impossible to watch.
The director has gone on to have an eclectic and genre-defying career, leaping recently to live-action manga adaptations with 2024’s “Let’s Go Karaoke!” and a rotoscoped animation film from that same year, “Ghost Cat Anzu.”
Among the pop culture legacy of his film is the teenage punk band The Linda Lindas, which took its name from the film upon forming in 2018.
“I was really surprised to have these young American girls name a band after my movie. It’s just surreal and surprising,” Yamashita said. “It’s not odd, the pop-culture effect it’s having, but I keep thinking why? I’m wondering why, I’m analyzing why. Because when I made this movie, I was so young, and I did a lot of it unconsciously, or so in the moment, I don’t think I even remember what it was like when I was shooting.”
While music is the soul of the picture, the dynamic between the four girls is the heart. The euphoric performance that ends the movie, Yamashita said on the call, almost didn’t happen – suggesting that the movie first imagined from the script he wrote with Kôsuke Mukai and Wakako Miyashita ended with the girls napping and missing their show, instead of awaking at the last minute to pull off their triumph.
For the same reason, it was important that is a Korean student, an outsider, who grabs the mic for the band: The girls connect through the Blue Hearts’ songs, the great emotional translator.
“The last performance scene is important, but just as important are the scenes where they’re practicing, or talking on the rooftop or eating together. Falling asleep while practicing. That’s what life is,” Yamashita said.
It’s that authenticity that makes “Linda Linda Linda” so enduring – though the effect is different decades later.
“At the time in 2005, ‘Linda Linda Linda’ was more about pop and energy. Now that it’s remastered and rereleased 20 years later, I think there’s a sense of it being nostalgic and deep. There’s a different feeling of what audiences are getting from the film, but maybe that’s also because the audiences have gotten older,” Yamashita said. “I think it’s more sentimental or fleeting, because youth is fleeting.”
The “Linda Linda Linda” 4K remaster plays Friday through Oct. 8 at The Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St., Harvard Square, Cambridge.
Translation courtesy of Satsuki Yamashita. The interview was edited for length and clarity.
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